BU professor undertakes New Bedford-wide public health study

Sunday

Feb 13, 2011 at 12:01 AM

NEW BEDFORD — A Boston University professor is spearheading a three-year, wide-ranging public health study of the city's population that will look for trends and patterns of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — commonly referred to as ADHD — and cardiovascular disease amid a confluence of health factors, ranging from urban pollution to personal dieting.

Dan McDonald

NEW BEDFORD — A Boston University professor is spearheading a three-year, wide-ranging public health study of the city's population that will look for trends and patterns of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — commonly referred to as ADHD — and cardiovascular disease amid a confluence of health factors, ranging from urban pollution to personal dieting.

Jon Levy, a professor at the university's School of Public Health, is leading the study, which he says will analyze health risks for people who have multiple "stressors."

Part of the study will focus on chemicals that may contribute to ADHD and cardiovascular disease.

For the former, the study will examine links to environmental tobacco smoke, lead, mercury, and PCBs. Levy's analysis of ADHD in the community also will take into account risk factors such as prenatal tobacco and alcohol exposure, family history of ADHD, gender, socioeconomic status and low birth weight.

For cardiovascular disease, the study will consider traffic-related particulate matter, lead, mercury and environmental tobacco, as well as "non-chemical stressors," such as cholesterol, blood pressure, and age.

The study will cover the entire city, said Levy, not just neighborhoods that abut sites that have a history of contamination, such as New Bedford Harbor or the Parker Street Waste site.

Levy and researchers from Harvard Unviersity and Brigham and Women's Hospital hope to create a "cumulative risk assessment," through culling existing population data throughout the city and meshing that with other sources of information.

"One of the goals is to see if you can build these models on publicly available data," said Levy.

Since the 1990s, Dr. Susan Korrick, a physician and epidemiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, has tracked the health of more than 700 New Bedford youths.

Korrick said Levy will integrate information from her work with demographic information and air pollution patterns made available through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"We're looking at putting all that information together to identify ways of determining people's risk," said Korrick.

Ultimately, Levy hopes to build models and maps of the city that reflect his findings.

The work, which is funded by a $750,000 EPA grant, is "just getting under way," said Levy last week.

Locally, the NorthStar Learning Center, a nonprofit social service agency located on Linden Street that provides a school youth development program, youth and foster care, intervention, mentoring, and family support, among other services, will be in charge of community outreach for the project.

The center will see $40,000 of the grant each year for the next three years, said Dr. Robert French, the center's director of policy and program development.

"The major portion of the grant will be used for research and coming up with models of risk factors facing New Bedford residents," said French recently.

Levy said the study will examine an individual's personal health habits and attempt to figure out, "once you add environmental risk factors, what is the added burden?"

"There's a lot of different things we're going to grapple with," said Levy.

Edwin Rivera, president of Hands Across the River, says activists have been advocating for a comprehensive, city-wide health study for years.

John "Buddy," Andrade, a community activist who is the executive director of the Old Bedford Village Development Corp., said last Wednesday he was unaware of the project and was skeptical about whether the results of the study would produce any meaningful new information. He was worried the study would not address "environmental justice" issues.

Andrade wanted to know, "What are the specific chemicals that cause specific diseases?"

While most previous health studies examined one stressor at a time, Levy said this study will look at the risks from multiple chemical and non-chemical stressors in the city.

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